Get 9 Hours of DSLR Battery Life for Less than $100

Expand your DSLR battery life to over 9 hours with this awesome trick.

Athough DSLRSs were not initially created to shoot video, over the last decade they’ve slowly become go-to cameras for low to medium budget film productions. But the small DSLR batteries run out of juice incredibly fast. The quick and easy fix to this is to buy a bunch of cheap knockoff batteries off the Internet, but these batteries often fail and bring about many headaches on set.

We might have found a solution, Chris Winter of ItsChrisWinter.com has created a video that shows his quick fix that allows users to get over 9 hours of continual shooting. The basics are buying an external 10000 mAh battery and a dummy battery from Amazon. Once you plug in the dummy battery into your camera you can use the larger external battery to power the camera. He also suggests using a cheese-plate so you can mount it to the hot shoe on the top of the camera.

We haven’t tried this solution ourselves but it seems like it is a viable way to expand your battery life without having to use an overly complicated rig.

Where to Buy

You can buy the external battery, the dummy battery and the cheese-plate from Amazon. We also highly recommend buying some velcro while you are there, not only to attach to the battery to the cheese-plate but also as a useful tool on set. This solution works for both Canon and Nikon cameras.

Have any other mods that expand battery life? Share in the comments below.